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The
Media Is the Mess

By Robert Parry
July 17, 2001

The
belated discovery that George W. Bush’s campaign applied two disparate
standards for counting overseas ballots in Florida – liberal for Bush
strongholds and stringent for counties carried by Al Gore – underscores
again the huge advantage that the well-funded conservative news media
gives the Republicans.

By having a powerful media of its own – from TV
networks to nationwide talk radio, from news magazines to daily newspapers
– the conservative movement can give its stamp to events during the
crucial few days when the public is paying attention. By the time, the
truth comes out – if it does – it's often too late to change the
outcome.

Now, eight months after the razor-thin Florida vote
– and nearly six months into Bush’s presidency – The New York Times
reveals that a key moment of Election 2000 came when the Bush campaign
labeled Gore unpatriotic for insisting that Florida's law be followed in
counting overseas absentee votes, including those from military personnel.

Immediately, the Gore-as-unpatriotic charge was
picked up by the conservative press and echoed on the TV talk shows. The
mainstream press joined the stampede.

Gore also faced accusations of hypocrisy for seeking
hand recounts for ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines while
urging that legal requirements be met for overseas ballots. Sen. Joe
Lieberman, Gore’s running mate, was verbally bludgeoned on NBC’s
“Meet the Press” until he agreed that the overseas military votes
should be given the “benefit of the doubt.”

The Bush strategy opened the door for Republicans to
press for lax standards on overseas votes in pro-Bush counties while
enforcing narrow rules for pro-Gore counties, a six-month New York Times
investigation found. The result was that about 680 questionable ballots
were counted that would have been rejected under the terms of Florida’s
election statute.

Those overseas ballots lacked required postmarks,
were postmarked after Election Day, were mailed inside the United States,
were cast by voters who had already voted, were missing signatures or
contained other irregularities. Meanwhile, hundreds of ballots with
similar flaws in pro-Gore counties were thrown away.

It could not be determined exactly how many votes
Bush gained from the disparate standards used to count flawed ballots. But
the Times reported that a statistical analysis of the 680 questionable
ballots indicated that Bush probably netted about 292 votes, meaning that
his official victory margin of 537 votes would have been trimmed to 245
votes if those ballots had not been counted. [NYT, July 15, 2001]

Adding the Tallies

That finding – combined with newspaper analyses of
Florida ballots that were kicked out by voting machines but that indicated
a presidential choice – means that Gore most likely would have won the
state and thus the presidency if a statewide recount had been conducted
and the flawed overseas ballots had been excluded.

The Miami Herald and USA Today reported that Gore
registered a net gain of 682 if so-called “overvotes” had been checked
by hand. That number alone would be more than enough to erase Bush's
537-vote margin, but the newspapers made other adjustments to the tally as
they incorporated uncounted ballots that showed intent of the voters.

The newspapers concluded
that Gore would have won by 242 if ballots with multiple indentations --
indicating a malfunctioning machine -- were counted. Gore's margin would
have swelled to 332 if ballots with indentations only for president were
counted. If all indented ballots were thrown out, however, Bush would have
won by margins of 407 or 152, depending on whether ballots with hanging
chads or only fully punched through chads were counted, the newspapers
reported.

The New York Times' finding suggests that if the
faulty overseas votes were disqualified -- costing Bush another 292 net
votes -- Gore would have won under three of the four standards for
counting ballots.

Additionally, USA Today reported that Gore lost about
15,000 to 25,000 votes from ballot errors that resulted from confusing
ballot designs in some counties.

In another move that cut into Gore’s tally, Gov.
Jeb Bush’s administration improperly purged hundreds of voters –
predominately African-American – after falsely identifying them as
felons. According to exit polls, Gore carried the African-American vote by
a 9-to-1 margin, so the phony felon purge predictably hit him hardest.

Now, with The New York Times’ findings, it is even
clearer that Gore was the choice of Florida voters as well as the U.S.
electorate which favored him by more than a half million ballots.
Nevertheless, the American people ended up with George W. Bush in the
White House.

Media Edge

The will of the American voters was overturned in
large part becausethe Bush
campaign and itsconservative
media allies succeeded in portraying Gore as the interloper and Bush as
the rightful claimant of the presidency.

From Election Night on, the conservative news media
and much of the mainstream national press granted Bush a sense of
entitlement. This pro-Bush tilt was a carryover from the campaign where
the national news media’s distaste for Bill Clinton’s vice president
was a key factor in helping Bush overcome a public impression that he
lacked the qualifications to be president.

Often relying on false Gore quotes or applying
hostile interpretations to his remarks, the news media neutralized many of
the doubts about Bush by portraying Gore as dishonest or delusional. By
contrast, deceptive remarks by Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney,
were given a virtual pass by both the conservative and mainstream news
media. [See "Protecting
Bush-Cheney" at Consortiumnews.com]

During the Florida recount battle, the pattern
continued. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other conservative news outlets
treated the certification of Bush’s victory by Secretary of State
Katherine Harris as decisive. They also portrayed Gore as a “sore
loserman” and were quick to promote other Republican “themes” such
as the attack on Gore’s initial insistence on applying state law to
overseas votes.

Mainstream news outlets sometimes struggled for a
more neutral position, though the competitive pressures caused them to
jump on many of the bandwagons set in motion by the conservative outlets.
There was no countervailing media organization investigating and
highlighting misdeeds by the Bush campaign.

So, for instance, relatively little attention was
given to the Bush campaign’s financing of hooligans who were dispatched
from the Republican congressional offices to Florida to organize rowdy
demonstrations, including a
riot outside the offices of the Miami-Dade canvassing board as it was
trying to start a hand recount of votes on Nov. 22.

In the months since the election, the Bush campaign
has refused to release information about how it spent roughly $8 million
on the recount battle. Though that data could be vital to understanding
how the Bush campaign pursued its hardball political strategies, there has
been no clamor from the national news media for this information.

The spending data also might shed light on one startling
disclosure in the new Times story. The newspaper reported that
Secretary of State Harris, a co-chairman of the Bush campaign, allowed
“veteran Republican political consultants” to set up a “war room”
in her offices from which they “helped shape the post-election
instructions (from Harris) to county canvassing boards.” Among those
instructions were the requirements for counting overseas ballots.

During the key days of last November, however,
conservative media outlets and much of the mainstream press portrayed
Harris as the victim of a Democratic smear campaign when the Gore campaign
challenged the objectivity of her decisions.

New Reality

Beyond the 2000 Election, this conservative media
tilt has become a dominant reality in modern U.S. politics.

The imbalance also was not an accident. It resulted
from a conscious, expensive and well-conceived plan by conservatives to
build what amounts to a rapid-response media machine. This machine closely
coordinates with Republican leaders and can strongly influence – if not
dictate – what is considered news.

There is no countervailing media on the
left-of-center side, except for a handful of small-circulation leftist
journals whose writers often join with conservatives in attacking
Democrats though for different reasons.

The only major media force, outside the conservative
fold, is the mainstream media – sometimes called the corporate media
since it is owned by huge companies such as AOL Time Warner, General
Electric or Viacom. This media operates with the goal of maximizing
profits and thus seeks to avoid alienating well-heeled consumers among its
diverse viewers.

Since the conservative media aggressively pushes its
information into play, however, the mainstream media often feels obliged
to match the conservative-oriented news rather than lose out competitively
or be seen as holding an anti-conservative bias.

This dynamic has been apparent for years, though
little commented upon. It began to emerge during the Reagan-Bush
administration as the conservative media grew and mainstream journalists
found themselves attacked by the right as alleged “liberals.” To
protect their careers within corporations that were generally favorable to
the Republican administration, mainstream journalists shifted their
reporting to the right as a way to prove they weren’t “liberal.”

That tendency increased during the Clinton
administration as the right-wing press and the mainstream press teamed up
to promote “scandals” such as the Travel Office firings and the
Clintons’ Whitewater real-estate investment. Stories of such minimal
importance would have been one-day events, if reported at all, during the
Reagan-Bush years. But the conservative media whipped these stories along
and mainstream reporters followed so they wouldn't be tagged as Clinton
apologists.

The Thomas/Hill Factor

From 1993 to 2000, the conservative media also
mounted well-funded investigations of the Clintons’ personal lives, a
strategy driven in part by a chip-on-the-shoulder conviction that the
liberals had done the same in falsely accusing Republican Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas of a bizarre pattern of sexual harassment toward
female subordinates, including boasts about pornographic movies he had
watched.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Thomas had angrily denied the charges and
conservative journalist David Brock had discredited Thomas’ principal
accuser, Anita Hill, as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”
in an article that ran in the American Spectator.

Now, a decade later, Brock has recanted his attacks
on Hill and his defense of Thomas. In his upcoming book Blinded by the
Right [excerpted in Talk magazine, August 2001], Brock described how
he was recruited and paid by right-wing forces to destroy Hill.

“I saw my introduction to right-wing checkbook
journalism as a big break,” Brock wrote. “I set out to rehabilitate
Thomas and clear his name for the history books by exposing the treachery
of his liberal detractors; in framing the article I would play to the
deeply ingrained conservative suspicion that the ‘liberal media’ had
hidden the real story behind Hill’s case.”

This myth of the “liberal media” dates back even
further to the 1970s when conservative activists blamed the press for
losing the Vietnam War and hounding an innocent President Richard Nixon
from office over the Watergate scandal.

These beliefs have remained conservative doctrine in
the quarter century since, even though the U.S. military has conceded that
the Vietnam War was lost by poor strategy and high casualties, not from
disloyal reporting. [For details, see The Military and the Media: The
U.S. Army in Vietnam by Pentagon historian William M. Hammond.]

The conservative certainty about the media’s
unfairness to Nixonalso has
held firm despite the release of hundreds of hours of incriminating White
House tapes.

Nevertheless, conservative activists felt that this
perceived enemy – this “liberal media” – justified their creation
of a separate right-wing media and their attacks on mainstream reporters
who dug up information unfavorable to the conservative cause.“We needed our own media, our own reporters, and our own means of
getting out our side of the story,” Brock wrote.

Activist Judges

Beyond admitting now that he unfairly maligned Hill
to protect Thomas, Brock adds stunning details about how the smear
campaign collaborated with leading conservatives, including key judges on
the federal courts.

One of those judges was U.S. Appeals Court Judge
Laurence Silberman, who was one of two judges who overturned Oliver
North’s Iran-contra felony convictions in 1990.

“Though the confirmation battle had been won,
Thomas’s closest friends knew that a full-scale defense of Thomas would
help confer legitimacy on his Supreme Court tenure,” Brock wrote. George
H.W. Bush's White House passed along some psychiatric opinion that Anita
Hill suffered from “erotomania,” Brock wrote, but some of the more
colorful criticism of Hill came from Silberman.

“Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian
‘acting out’,” Brock wrote. “Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas
would never have asked Hill for dates: She had bad breath.”

According to Brock, Silberman’s wife Ricky played
an even more active role in the campaign to discredit Hill. [Prior to his
appointment as a federal judge, Laurence Silberman also was implicated in
questionable contacts with Iranian emissaries during Ronald Reagan’s
1980 presidential campaign. For details, see Robert Parry’s Trick or
Treason.]

After Brock expanded his assault on Hill into a
best-selling book, The Real Anita Hill, the Silbermans and other
prominent conservatives joined a celebration at the Embassy Row
Ritz-Carlton, Brock wrote. Also in attendance was U.S. Appeals Court Judge
David Sentelle, the other judge who had voted to reverse North’s
Iran-contra convictions. [Sentelle also cast a deciding vote in
overturning Iran-contra felony convictions of Reagan’s national security
adviser John Poindexter.]

In 1992, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William
Rehnquist named Sentelle to run a three-judge panel that selected special
prosecutors. In appointing Sentelle, Rehnquist
waived statutory guidance as well as years of precedents that sought
to give control of the special-prosecutor apparatus only to senior or
retired judges who did not have strong partisan reputations.

By contrast, Sentelle was a junior judge and a protégé
of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Sentelle used his new powers to appoint
conservative lawyers to handle sensitive investigations. Sentelle’s
selections included conservative activists to investigate alleged offenses
by the Clinton administration, most notably Kenneth Starr to examine
Clinton’s business and personal affairs.

Brock’s disclosure about the direct interest by
federal judges in partisan activities, including dishonest efforts to
discredit Anita Hill, an American citizen who had testified about the
qualifications of an appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, might have been
big news if the United States had a different news media.

Instead, the debate about Brock’s Anita Hill
confession focused on whether the admissions of a liar like Brock should
ever be believed. There was no independent journalistic effort to evaluate
the detailed evidence that Brock presented about the conservative cabal
that went to extraordinary lengths to turn Hill’s life into a living
hell.

Clinton Fallout

Brock’s admission also might have prompted a fuller
discussion of the national press corps' behavior during the Clinton
administration.

After the Thomas-Hill controversy, Brock spearheaded
another conservative-funded journalistic inquiry into the Clintons’
personal lives. In late 1993, Brock wrote an article for the American
Spectator that pulled together various allegations from state troopers and
others in Arkansas about the Clintons’ alleged sexual dalliances.

The story provoked a new controversy dubbed “Troopergate,”
which gave rise to the dubious sexual harassment allegations against
Clinton from Paula Jones. The conservative media seized on those charges,
in part, as retaliation for the supposedly bogus Anita Hill charges
against Clarence Thomas.

Before long, the mainstream news media joined in the
pursuit of the “Clinton scandals,” leading to an unprecedented press
assault on the private lives of a First Family.

As this assault proceeded, there was almost no
reporting about the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of a right-wing
cabal to regain the White House through scandal-mongering. Indeed, when
First Lady Hillary Clinton complained about the “vast right-wing
conspiracy” in 1998, her remarks were met with howls of ridicule and
derision. [The few exceptions included Salon.com and Consortiumnews.com]

The national press corps behaved then – and
continues to behave to this day – as if her allegations were beyond
ludicrous. After all, if such a conspiracy had existed, the crack
Washington press corps would have known about it, right? [For more
details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Quisling
Press."]

The Bush Election

Yet, in many ways, the culmination of this media
phenomenon was not the impeachment of Clinton in 1998. It was the campaign
and election in 2000.

Key journalists at both conservative and mainstream
outlets – angered that Clinton had survived eight years of
investigations – took out their frustrations on Vice President Al Gore.

Even leading newspapers, such as The New York Times
and The Washington Post, put words into Gore’s mouth about his role in
the Love Canal toxic-waste cleanup and then dragged
their heels about running corrections. Other bogus Gore quotes became
urban legends, such as his supposed assertion that he had “invented”
the Internet.

The exaggerated reporting about Gore’s supposed
exaggerations also put the banana peel under his foot for the moments when
he made real, though minor, slip-ups.

In October, the news media went into overdrive after
a presidential debate when Gore incorrectly recalled a trip to Texas with
the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Gore had
actually gone with the deputy director. The Bush campaign fed the mistake
to the press and the error dominated the campaign for a week.

A completely different media posture was apparent
when Bush or Cheney made similar or worse misstatements – including Cheney’s
lie that the government had nothelped
him in his business career at the helm of Halliburton Co. The truth was
that Cheney had lobbied successfully for federal loan guarantees and other
government largesse. Those falsehoods, however, were deemed not worthy of
reporting by the major national press.

The Recount Experience

The pattern of looking only one way continued into
the Florida recount battle. Gore was portrayed as the aggressor trying to
overturn the rightful result of Bush’s victory. Little attention was
paid to the maneuverings by the Bush campaign to secure the electoral
votes in defiance of the will of the voters.

After the recount battle, BBC journalist Greg Palast
disclosed how Jeb Bush’s subordinates had mounted an extraordinary
effort to purge felons from the voting rolls and knowingly included
legitimate voters with similar names and addresses.

The scheme denied the right to vote to a
disproportionate number of African-Americans, but there was scant
follow-up in the major news media. The Washington Post did not write its
matcher of Palast’s work until almost half a year after the
election.

Also in the months after the election, the Bush
campaign refused to release details about its recount-battle spending,
with barely a whimper from the mainstream press.

Now, nearly six months into the Bush presidency, The
New York Times discovers that Bush padded his tiny lead through a strategy
of letting in questionable overseas votes in his counties while blocking
them in pro-Gore counties.

(To add insult to injury, the Bush campaign got five
conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court -- including Thomas and Rehnquist
-- to block a statewide Florida recount in December on the grounds that
disparate standards would be used in counting the votes, exactly what Bush
had done with the overseas ballots.)

What the Future Holds

Yet, as Bush finishes his first six months in the
White House, the imbalance in the U.S. news media only worsens.

Fox News has become a leading force in cable news as
it dishes out a steady diet of conservative opinions and slanted news
coverage. “Fox News Channel has become a vanity showcase catering to the
Angry White Male in his autumn plumage,” observed writer John Wolcott.
[Vanity Fair, August 2001]

Bland CNN – now part of the media behemoth AOL Time
Warner – is planning a makeover, presumably to challenge Fox for
some of it’s A.W.M. viewers.

Though CNN is sometimes portrayed as the liberal
counterweight to Fox, in reality, it gives equal or greater weight to
conservative voices, with the “liberals” often represented by centrist
journalistic types. By contrast, right-wing columnist Robert Novak does
double duty on CNN, giving his opinions and showing up as a reporter.

On the AM dials, Rush Limbaugh and copycat radio
opinion hosts continue to rant. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, with his
mysterious source of seemingly unlimited cash, continues to subsidize the
Washington Times as a daily voice for harsh attacks on Democrats and
strong defenses of the Bush administration. The Wall Street Journal
editorial page does the same, not to mention Murdoch’s New York Post and
other hard-right publications around the country.

Conservatives also dominate the magazine racks with
many of their publications, from the Weekly Standard to American
Spectator, heavily subsidized either by right-wing funders or conservative
foundations coordinating their spending to get the biggest ideological
bang for the buck. [For more details about the conservative media, see
"Democrats
Dilemma."]

By contrast, the Bush-Gore election debacle has
sparked virtually no response from well-heeled liberals to create or support news
outlets that could change the current imbalance.

Even as Bush pursues a hard-right agenda –
including repudiating the Kyoto global-warming protocol and the
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty – liberals seem content to cede control of
the national news to a combination of hard-charging right-wing bulls and
cowed mainstream types.

Except for a few new Web sites, apparently run by
rank-and-file Democrats, there has been no change in the media dynamic –
and the Web sites clearly reach only a tiny percentage of the American
people.

Liberals apparently feel that the situation will
either fix itself or can be overcome by more grassroots organizing, a view
comparable to the resistance of some companies in the 1950s to shift their
marketing from door-to-door salesmen to television advertising. Ironically,
the conservatives have shown themselves more amenable to change than the liberals.

Despite the new disclosures about Bush campaign
shenanigans, the larger reality for now and for the foreseeable future is
that conservatives will continue to hold the upper hand on how the press
perceives and reports the political news, at least during the crucial days
and weeks when power is in the balance.

Marshall McLuhan's famous quote might need some
editing. Today, it might read: "the media is the mess."

During the 1980s, Robert Parry broke many of the
stories known as the Iran-contra affair for The Associated Press and
Newsweek.